Shows / Generative AI 101
Generative AI 101
Welcome to Generative AI 101, your go-to podcast for learning the basics of generative artificial intelligence in easy-to-understand, bite-sized episodes. Join host Emily Laird, AI Integration Technologist and AI lecturer, to explore key concepts, applications, and ethical considerations, making AI accessible for everyone.
Episodes
- Generative AI 101
OpenAI's June 2025 Disrupting Malicious Use of AI Report
Generative AI has a dark side, and it’s not just stealing jobs, it’s applying for them. In this episode, host Emily Laird goes underground with OpenAI’s new…
- Generative AI 101
Miami-Dade County & the Rise of the GenAI Natives
AI isn’t just crashing Miami’s pool parties anymore, it’s moving into the classroom, and no, it’s not just helping kids cheat better. In this episode, hot…
- Generative AI 101
AI & Jobs: On Amodei, Huang, & Roose
Grab your ergonomic chair and emotional support coffee, this one’s about your job, and whether AI already has it. In this episode of Generative AI 101, Emily…
- Generative AI 101
Google's Veo 3 Part 2: Use Cases
Lights, camera, algorithm! This week, host Emily Laird hands the director’s chair to Google’s Veo 3, an AI video model that spits out 4K cinematic clips on…
- Generative AI 101
Google's Veo 3 Part 1
Google DeepMind just dropped Veo 3, and it's basically Final Cut Pro with a soul—or at least a solid camera sense. This episode, we're breaking down why this…
- Generative AI 101
Return of the Ive: OpenAI’s $6.5B Minimalist Makeover
What happens when OpenAI gives $6.5 billion to the man who made your iPhone hot and your MacBook sleek? You get a screenless, AI-native gadget designed by Jony…
- Generative AI 101
AI & Copyright: The USCO's 3rd AI Report... The Spicy One.
Let's break down the U.S. Copyright Office’s spicy third report on AI, ya know, the one that's throwing elbows and reportedly got Perlmutter canned. From…
- Generative AI 101
AI & Copyright: The USCO Trilogy
AI-generated Tom Cruise? Button-mashing cyberpunk operas? Welcome to the legal circus. In this episode, Emily Laird breaks down the U.S. Copyright Office’s…
- Generative AI 101
AI & Copyright: Pipe Dreams & Legal Screams
So you typed “a cat smoking a pipe in Van Gogh’s style” into your favorite AI tool, cool flex, but don’t try to copyright it. In this episode, host Emily Laird…
- Generative AI 101
AI & Copyright: ...Yikes.
Generative AI crashed the copyright party in 2023 and it didn’t wipe its boots at the door. In this episode, we break down the chaotic, caffeinated debate over…
- Generative AI 101
H2-Oh No! Why Your ChatGPT Habit Is Drying Out the Planet
Think AI runs on math and magic? Try 66 billion liters of water. In this episode, host Emily Laird exposes AI’s dirty little secret: data centers are chugging…
- Generative AI 101
Your Chatbot vs. the Planet
AI isn't magic; it's math and metal, and it has a monster appetite for electricity. In this episode, host Emily Laird digs into the eco-footprint of Generative…
- Generative AI 101
The LMSArena Illusion
Ever wonder who’s really winning the Chatbot Arena and whether those wins mean anything at all? In this episode of Generative AI 101, host Emily Laird's…
- Generative AI 101
I, Chatbot: Does Your LLM Dream of Electric Angst?
Let's crack open the philosophical piñata known as machine consciousness. Can an LLM feel pride? Regret? Existential dread when you close the browser tab? Host…
- Generative AI 101
Dario Amodei's Latest Essay
Let's crack open Dario Amodei’s latest essay, The Urgency of Interpretability, and ask the big, slightly terrifying question: do we actually know what our AIs…
- Generative AI 101
AI as Therapist, Yep, It's Happening.
AI therapy apps are popping off, but should you really trust a chatbot with your late-night existential crisis? In this episode, we crack open the weird…
- Generative AI 101
Image Prompt Like a Pro, Yo!
Image generation isn’t magic, it’s a recipe. In this episode, host Emily Laird is stirring up the flavorful world of AI image prompting using keywords and…
- Generative AI 101
A1 Art: How to Feed Your Prompt Like a Pro
Image prompting isn’t just “describe it and pray”, it’s ordering a gourmet dish at a snobby robot diner. This week on Generative AI 101, Emily Laird returns…
- Generative AI 101
Dude, Where's My Job?
AI isn’t just flirting with your job anymore, it’s taking it out to dinner and meeting its parents. In this episode, host Emily Laird digs into the eerie…
- Generative AI 101
GPT-4.1: All Hail the Lord of the Tokens!
GPT-4.1 is here, and it’s not messing around. In this episode, Emily Laird breaks down why this model is smarter, faster, and hungrier than any AI we’ve seen…
- Generative AI 101
AI’s Hot Girl Year (According to Stanford)
AI isn’t some distant overlord plotting in a lab; it’s already writing your emails, diagnosing your cough, and maybe deciding your loan approval. In this…
- Generative AI 101
ChatGPT Knows What You Did Last Summer.
ChatGPT just got a memory upgrade, and no, it’s not just remembering your favorite pizza toppings. OpenAI’s newest update means the chatbot can now remember…
- Generative AI 101
The AI Futures Project: Part 4, The End
It’s 2027, and things are getting... spicy. This episode, host Emily Laird breaks down the summer-to-fall chaos from The AI Futures Project—a quarterly update…
- Generative AI 101
The AI Future's Project Part 3: 2027
AI’s gone full sci-fi and it’s only January. In this episode, host Emily Laird walks us through the first half of 2027 in the AI Futures Project, where…
- Generative AI 101
The AI Future's Project Part 2: 2026
It’s 2026 and AI isn’t just helping out, it’s taking over the whiteboard and your white-collar job. In this episode, host Emily Laird breaks down the AI…
- Generative AI 101
The AI Future's Project Part 1
AI agents have officially stopped playing assistant and started acting like your over-caffeinated junior dev—occasionally brilliant, mostly chaotic, and…
- Generative AI 101
AGI is Coming. There, I Said It.
AI’s not just playing Jeopardy anymore, it’s coming for the Mensa crowd. In this episode, host Emily Laird spirals (productively) over Humanity’s Last Exam, a…
- Generative AI 101
Google's Gemini 2.5
Google’s Gemini 2.5 just set a new standard on Humanity’s Last Exam and flexed hard in the AI Fight Club, outpacing GPT-4.5 and Grok-3. It reasons, codes…
- Generative AI 101
Humanity's Last Exam
Standardized tests are getting torched like marshmallows at a bonfire, and AI's top students are flunking the new final. In this episode, Emily unpacks…
- Generative AI 101
a16z Top Gen AI Consumer Apps Report: Big Money & Big Scams
Mobile AI apps are raking in cash—or at least convincing you that your fern obsession is worth $20 a month. This episode dissects the Andreessen Horowitz Top…
- Generative AI 101
a16z Top Gen AI Consumer Apps Report: The VibeCoder Revolution
Forget dark-mode IDEs and midnight debugging crises—AI tools are ushering in a vibecoder revolution. This episode unpacks the surge in agentic IDEs like Cursor…
- Generative AI 101
a16z Top Gen AI Consumer Apps Report: Reverage of the Video Gen Models
AI video generation isn't awkwardly fumbling anymore—it's making Hollywood sweat. This episode explores the meteoric rise of Gen AI video apps like Hailuo and…
- Generative AI 101
a16z Top Gen AI Consumer Apps Report: ChatGPT & Deepseek
AI moves fast—one minute you're on top, the next, you're a footnote. In this episode of Generative AI 101, we break down the latest Andreessen Horowitz Top 100…
- Generative AI 101
Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview: Qw... Q... the Future?
Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview is here, and it’s not just another chatbot—it’s an AI reasoning machine that can handle complex math, coding, and logic like a pro…
- Generative AI 101
Llama 3.3 70B: A lean, mean, useful AI
Let's chat Meta's Llama 3.3 70B. This lean, mean AI machine can generate text, write code, and even produce synthetic data—all without needing a supercomputer…
- Generative AI 101
Claude 3.7 Sonnet: The AI That Codes & Computes
Claude 3.7 Sonnet isn’t just another AI—it’s Anthropic’s latest and smartest yet, balancing speed and deep reasoning like a human flipping between Twitter and…
- Generative AI 101
ChatGPT 4.5: The Wildcard of AI
ChatGPT 4.5 isn’t your typical AI—it’s the Marlon Brando of chatbots, rebellious, intuitive, and full of surprises. In this episode, we break down what makes…
- Generative AI 101
February 2025 Recap: AI Ethics... Oh Boy.
AI is growing faster than a teenager with a DoorDash addiction, rewriting history, babysitting America’s kids, and maybe taking your job… or part of it…
- Generative AI 101
February 2025 Recap: Industry Integration & Government Regulation
AI isn’t just in Silicon Valley—it’s in your bank, your weather app, and maybe even deciding how much you’ll pay for groceries. Meanwhile, governments are…
- Generative AI 101
February 2025 Recap: AI, Lawsuits, and a $97 Billion Bid
Corporate AI is a battlefield, and February 2025 was full of billion-dollar moves, legal battles, and rejected takeovers. Elon Musk tried (and failed) to buy…
- Generative AI 101
February 2025 Recap: AI Breakthroughs
February 2025 was wild. China launched an AI-powered space race, OpenAI decided to Marie Kondo its model lineup, and Microsoft unveiled a quantum processor…
- Generative AI 101
Grok & Roll: Musk’s AI War and the Fight for AGI
Elon Musk isn’t just building another chatbot—he’s aiming for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that’s smarter than us (but ideally not homicidal…
- Generative AI 101
xAI's Colossus: Running on GPUs and Controversy
xAI’s Colossus isn’t just a supercomputer—it’s a 200,000-GPU monster with a sustainability side hustle and a power bill that could light up a small city. In…
- Generative AI 101
Grok vs. The World: Musk’s AI with a Rebel Streak
Meet Grok—Elon Musk’s answer to ChatGPT, but with less polish and more attitude. Built to be “maximally helpful” (or just maximally blunt), this chatbot pulls…
- Generative AI 101
xAI: Musk, Money, and AI Mayhem
Elon Musk’s latest brainchild, xAI, isn’t just another AI startup—it’s a $50 billion cosmic experiment with a punk rock attitude. In this episode, host Emily…
- Generative AI 101
GEO: How to Impress AI Search
Traditional SEO is out. If AI can’t find you, it can’t cite you—and if it doesn’t cite you, your content might as well not exist. AI-powered search isn’t just…
- Generative AI 101
GEO: Stop Writing for Robots (They’re Over It)
Keyword stuffing is as outdated as flip phones, and AI-driven search doesn’t care about your SEO tricks from 2012. AI isn’t just reading your content—it’s…
- Generative AI 101
GEO: SEO's AI Replacement
Google’s midlife crisis is here, and AI search is taking over. By 2026, search traffic is predicted to drop by 25%, and if your content isn’t optimized for AI…
- Generative AI 101
SEO Is Dead. Long Live GEO!
Traditional search engines are in trouble, and AI-powered search is calling the shots. Welcome to the world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), where…
- Generative AI 101
DeepSeek: Fact vs Fiction
DeepSeek’s R1 model dropped, and the internet lost its mind. Some say it’s a game-changer. Others call it a Cold War villain. Is it really the end of OpenAI? A…
- Generative AI 101
Reasoning Models & Prompt Engineering: Ask Smarter, Get Smarter
If you've ever yelled at ChatGPT for giving you a dumb answer, maybe the problem isn’t the AI—it’s the way you asked. In this episode, we break down how to…
- Generative AI 101
Pop Quiz, AI: How Do You Test a Thinking Machine?
AI keeps bragging about its "reasoning skills," but is it actually getting smarter, or just better at faking it? In this episode, we put AI’s so-called…
- Generative AI 101
A Reasoning Model Thinks, Therefore It...Is?
AI isn’t just playing back what it’s heard, it’s starting to think (or at least fake it really well). In this episode, we break down Reasoning Large Language…
- Generative AI 101
AI Inference. Reading Between the Data Points.
Inference is the thing that makes AI seem smart—until it absolutely isn’t. It’s how AI predicts words, makes decisions, and sometimes convinces you it actually…
- Generative AI 101
AI Agents Are Unionizing (Kind of)
AI agents aren’t just here to help, they’re teaming up, getting specialized, and maybe even plotting to replace your personal assistant and your fridge. In…
- Generative AI 101
Silicon Valley’s New Favorite Money Pit: AI Agents
AI agents aren’t just changing the game, folks, they are the game, and everyone with a venture capital fund is betting big. In this episode, we follow the…
- Generative AI 101
Who Runs the World? Agents.
AI agents aren’t just scheduling your meetings—they might be running the whole office soon. In this episode, we’re breaking down the biggest players in the AI…
- Generative AI 101
DeepSeek: The Cool Kid Giving Silicon Valley an AI Panic Attack
Let's unpack the rise of DeepSeek, the scrappy Chinese AI lab that’s making waves and giving Silicon Valley sleepless nights. From handing out free…
- Generative AI 101
OpenAI's Operator Agent: Beta Mode, Big Hype, and a Dash of Hallucinations
Another day, another OpenAI advancement - Emily Laird explores OpenAI’s latest innovation: the Operator Agent. Picture this—a virtual assistant with Sherlock…
- Generative AI 101
The Stargate Project: America’s $500 Billion AI Flex
Let's breakdown The Stargate Project—a $500 billion initiative aimed at turning the United States into the global epicenter of artificial intelligence. Think…